Is Excel costing you more than you think?

A recent trend we have noticed at Pentaho is that an increasing number of customers reaching out to us for their BI solution are using spreadmarts as the default reporting tool and rely heavily on Excel/spreadmarts for storing and gaining insight on their data. Red Flag! Often overlooked are the many risks that these spreadmarts introduce to your decision making process. While effective for displaying static data, Excel/spreadmarts are a poor substitute for modern business intelligence.

Last month, Pentaho hosted a webcast to answer the popular question, “How do you save money and time by replacing Excel/Spreadmarts?” The speakers featured experts Rick Sherman, co-author of the TDWI study, “Strategies for Managing Spreadmarts and Migrating to a Managed BI Environment” and Jake Cornelius, Director, Product Management at Pentaho. The attendance and response to the webcast was tremendous. If you missed this webcast, no worries, it is now on-demand to watch on your schedule. Here’s an inside look at some of the highlights:

You are not alone! The median company has 30 Spreadmarts. Average = 837!

The average costs of spreadmarts to an organization is $780,000 a year.

The benefits of allowing business users to use spreadmarts are that they already understand the tool and can do it without IT assistance.

The dangers associated with spreadmarts include lack of data consistency, audit trail and data governance as well as the productivity drain due to version control and inaccurate data – see screen shot below. (In this webcast learn how to mitigate this risk and successful strategies for reducing you companies dependency)

There is a solution, which allows you to see the difference a managed BI solution will make. In 3 days you can receive an initial proof of value using a set of your own data (check out the Pentaho 72 Hour Challenge).

We are listening! This webcast was a suggestion from our customers. What other topics are you interested to learn about from Pentaho? Let us know in the comments section below or on Twitter – we are @Pentaho.